Shogun Warriors Futurama Bender Jumbo Machinder

So if you haven’t heard, last weekend at the Toy Fair 2012, in New York, Toynami showed off they’re new line of Futurama toys, which included from Chibi, Super Deformed action figures to the next character in the Toynami Shogun Warriors line, which is also a Futurama character. The one and only Bender! Now as much as a Futurama fan as I am, I’m about a million times more of a Shogun Warriors/Jumbo Machinder fan, growing up with these toys as a kid, these were my favorites of my small toy collection in the 1970s, in Japan their is probably a zillion Jumbo Machinders, when Mattel released them in America, we got about five, they are as follows, Great Mazinga, Draguun, Brave Reideen, General Daimos, and Gaiking. Those were the first released, at least in my region, which was Miami, Florida. The later series was three more, UFO Robot Grendizer, Godzilla, and Rodan, all these were also released in two different Shogun Warriors die-cast metal toylines, with the exception of Godzilla and Rodan, who were also released as the enemies to the Shogun Warriors, in America, and somewhere down the line, Marvel Comics was licensed with a comic book series on the Shogun Warriors, which only starred one out of the five from the toyline, which was Brave Reideen, but in America this Super Robot was just known as “Raydeen”, I’ll get to the name changes later, if I remember. So the comic book starred Brave Reideen, Combatra, and Dangard Ace, which do have legit Jumbo Machinder toys, but the actual Jumbos were only released in Japan, Europe, and South America, all America got for Combatra and Dangard Ace were the comic book characters, and they were a part of the die-cast Shogun Warriors toyline, the die-cast figures had many more characters than the actual 24 inch Shogun Warriors, after the comic; Marvel Comics began a Godzilla comic book series and introduced Marvel Comics one and only Super Robot, Red Ronin, both comics were so unpopular that Marvel had to throw in characters like the Fantastic Four. Sometime later, around 1981 America got a Saturday morning cartoon series called Force Five, Force Five was a compilation of five different anime Super Robot shows, these shows are as follows, Gaiking, Getter Robo G(Draguun), Wakusei Robo Danguard Ace(Dangard Ace), Starzinger(Spaceketeers), UFO Robot Grendizer(Grandizer, also known as Goldorok in some parts). Growing up back home in Miami, I would watch these every Saturday as they swapped out episodes, it was one of the coolest cartoon series I ever saw as a kid.

So here we are thirty years later and a new company tries to take the torch in pushing out a line of Shogun Warriors, the first two Toynami Shogun Warriors were nice, Beast King Golion and Armored Fleet Dairugger, two of the Voltron forms, they are cool, big figures, basically plastic statues, and way overpriced in my opinion, but you know what, in 2011 another company, Super 7 decided to release a Shogun Warrior of they’re own, it’s a 24 inch Star Wars Stormtrooper, it too, is a pretty cool item for any collector to have on his or her robot shelf, but when it came out Super 7 was asking $300.00 bucks for this thing, okay, so it does shoot a fist and it does have wheels under it’s feet, like a real Shogun Warrior, and unlike the Toynami Shogun’s which are just basically big pieces of colored plastic that look cool as shelf queens, you can do more with the Super 7 Stormtrooper, I have one, but I didn’t pay the asking cost for it, screw that noise!

5 Comments on "Shogun Warriors Futurama Bender Jumbo Machinder"

As a Jumbo aficionado, I must concur that Bender is a snooze fest and I will skip him (not just because I couldn’t afford him even if I wanted him). There is no jumbo-style simplification to his sculpt. The stormtrooper was far more successful.

I love me some Bender, but I just don’t know about the sculpt. Yes, it looks like the character on the cartoon, but there is so much they could do with him to stylize him more toward the jumbo sculpts. As Jack F mentions below, the Super7 Stormtrooper worked because it was sculpted as a throwback to the old Jumbos. This just screams super big Bender.